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The left’s tools for thought
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:08 pm on 1/14/2005
So I went to Democracy for America’s web site, looking for a community. I mean, there supposedly was one, right? There was this community of well-sync’ed-up Dean volunteers who used the Internet effectively and blah blah blah. So I go look, and there’s no community. There’s a fairly generic activist-organization brochure. There’s nothing that feels like it has people in it.
Ah, but it leads to Blog for America! Surely there’s an active, interconnected community of progressive blogs hosted here! …Nope. Try again. There’s a somewhat dry group blog of Howard Dean-ish insiders, and a blogroll on the left side of the page, mostly comprising things that aren’t blogs. Where is this community I heard so much about… or maybe imagined?
Aha! DeanSpa… oh… wait. They took it down. They took it down and replaced it with a “coming soon” message. And apparently all it ever was was a version of some community software you could use for… your local group.
Indymedia? Nope - their front page links to a dozen subsites for local versions. (And they tend towards lunacy anyway.)
Daily Kos? It’s close, but it’s a news site. That means it is fundamentally going to be about complaining, because the American left has not yet set about the work of figuring out what it wants and likes. We know what we hate, what we stand against and want to say no to. (We know that so well that it tends to lead us to find things to say no to in each other’s agendas… leading to more fracturing and subdivision.) There’s some good community-driven stuff going on in Kos’ news-site context, but between the front-page flow of outrages and the threaded discussion system (don’t get me started), it’s not what I’m looking for.
That’s a pretty disheartening list. Why are we still so focused on splitting off into local groups, and single-issue groups? Aren’t we trying to unite progressives across the country? If so, why do we keep using tools for thought that divide and divide and divide? News sites and blogs can work for the right wing, because the groundwork of values and ideas has already been laid. Once you’ve built that context, you can throw around whatever you like inside of it.
If the task at hand is to find out what we can all say yes to - to build a stable moral platform, essentially - then maybe a wiki is what we want. But a major problem with wikis is they don’t feel like they have people in them. You hit a wiki page and it doesn’t feel alive with voices the way a Daily Kos post or a Slashdot story does. There’s also the discomfort a lot of people feel with the way wikis are edited - it makes them feel like there’s no accountability. These problems can both be addressed, with the will and the elbow grease (and the right codebase to start from, heh heh).
In the meantime, as long as we are trying to use Drupal and other software that encourages the “look at this point! Now look at this one! Ooh, shiny” approach, the instinct to keep our online communities local and small may be a good one. You know, it’s like how they tell you to keep your campsite small when you camp out at Yosemite: if you’re going to spread trash (and you are), don’t spread it everywhere.